Future Imperative: A Rare Verbal Construction in Iranian Languages

The imperative besides indicative and subjunctive is one of the most important moods in the languages of the world especially in indo-european languages. The imperative verb usually lacks tense inflection that occurs in other moods, therefore the future imperative is quite rare cross-linguistically. However a number of languages have a dedicated paradigm for future imperative. The future imperative has so far been reported for none of the iranian languages, except two languages, namely Sogdian and Ossetian. The present paper also studies a case of future imperative in Abyanei belonging to the Central Plateau Dialects. The Abyanei future imperative is expressed by inserting morphological markers [-iʃ] (in the affirmative) and [-ɔ] (in the negative) between the present stem and the verb ending.